Zia’s bleak existence has him contemplating suicide – except for one thing. He already slit his wrists, bleeding to death not long ago on the bathroom floor of his freshly cleaned apartment.

In Goran Kukic’s “Wristcutters,” an enjoyable and oddly affecting road trip movie that will live forever as a cult classic, you don’t risk killing yourself twice. You might end up in a place that’s even worse than the absurdist afterlife of Zia and his fellow suicides.

Zia killed himself after his girlfriend, Desiree (Leslie Bibb), dumped him. (Bad breakups seem to send a lot of young men over the edge in Etgar Keret’s short stories, one of which – “Kneller’s Happy Campers” – provides the movie’s source material.)

When Zia learns that Desiree killed herself, too, he hits the road with Russian rock singer Eugene (Shea Whigham) in a beat-up car that has no headlights but does possess a black hole underneath the passenger’s seat.

Along the way, driving through the decaying desert, they pick up beautiful hitchhiker Mikal (Shannyn Sossamon) who, believing she’s here by mistake, is searching for the “people in charge.” Help may come when they meet the mysterious Kneller (Tom Waits), the Wizard in this rotted Oz.

First-timer Kukic made “Wristcutters” on a shoestring budget, but he really nails the movie’s tone, which is strangely uplifting. Kukic filmed the urban scenes in downtown Los Angeles and shot the desert material in Lancaster and Palmdale with a great eye in finding the broken-down ugliness that exists in a land known for opportunity and reinvention.

The movie is authentically, confidently weird, modeling Eugene on Eugene Hutz from the great punk cabaret band Gogol Bordello and letting Waits do his soulful, shambling thing to perfection.

A life-affirming movie about suicide could go wrong in a million ways, but the understated “Wristcutters” straddles the line between sentiment and bleakness. It should enjoy a healthy afterlife.

Violent police encounters in California last year led to the deaths of 157 people and six officers, the state attorney general’s office said Thursday in a report that provides the first statewide tally on police use-of-force incidents.